While working on developing a PowerShell module, I was curious to find out the number of lines of code within all of the functions that comprise the module. I didn’t realise that the Measure-Object cmdlet has a Line parameter. Consequently, it is a trivial task since the module is made up of a number of text files.

Part of the wizard to setup vRA 7 includes a step towards the end to create a vRO workflow that will create initial content within a vRA Tenant. To run the workflow, login to the default vRA tenant as the configurationadmin account created as part of the initial setup: There are various inputs required depending on such things as if you wish to use the default Tenant or create an additional one:

vRA 6.2.2: while attempting to deploy a VM from blueprint we received the following error: Internal error: Error allocating network on machine. Attempted to divide by zero Pretty helpful error message as usual for this version of the product ;-) The Network Profile and Path appeared to be set correctly when requesting the VM. We eventually tracked it down to the Network Profile IP Range having run out of unallocated IPs.

A significant pain point on a recent project of mine was automating the creation of blueprints in vRA 6.2 with vRO. There was very little information around on how this could be achieved and even with the method that we eventually came up with still required some manual effort and was not always the most reliable. Enter vRA 7 and some hope that things may have gotten better. First of all I looked through the vRA 7 Programming Guide and found some examples on exporting content from vRA 7.

Compared to the previous Virgin Media router I had, this one has separate configuration areas for 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless. A bit of messing around with trying to connect the Chromecast to either 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless appeared fruitless until I dropped down the Wireless Mode setting from the default of up to 144Mbps to up to 54Mbps. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure that it was what the previous Virgin Media router was set to.

…..well in Kindle format anyway :-) The paperback version will be available on 11th January in the US and 12th January in the UK and according to the publisher, apparently in book shops from the 19th January. Seriously, if you actually see one in a book shop then please send me a photo, since I’ve not seen that happen outside of a VMworld. With my fellow authors, Luc Dekens, Glenn Sizemore, Brian Graf, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Boren, we spent the best part of 2015 putting this book together.

I’ve been looking for a decent learning resource for vRO since I started working with it and finally got some time to get through the VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook by Daniel Langenhan. I spent most of my early days with vRO just trying to figure out how to do things and why some things worked in a particular way - and mostly haranguing Michael Poore for some answers :-) This book covers getting everything setup and various decisions to be made about the design of the infrastructure pieces needed; Windows vs Appliance, which database, clustering etc.

I saw this post the other day about displaying Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII in vRO and thought it would be fun to see it in a PowerShell console. Make sure you have the telnet client installed on your workstation then simply fire off this command: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

When editing a vRealize Orchestrator workflow there’s a default option in the client which prompts you to increase the version of the workflow when you select Save and Close. While this is intended to be a good idea, since it at least makes people think about version control in their workflows and consequently they are then able to take advantage of some of vRO’s versioning features, it contains a fundamental flaw and makes me cringe when I see someone use it…

I’ve been working a lot with JSON files recently and quite regularly I need to update their content for testing of code changes. While editing the files I want to make sure I don’t introduce an error by making a syntax error in the JSON file. I’ve been using a quick way in PowerShell to test the JSON is clean and if not, to point me at the line in the file where there is a problem.